1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an organism collating method and apparatus for specifying an identical person by detecting organism characteristics of a human being, and more particularly an improved collating method and apparatus for specifying an identical person by collating a face as organic characteristics of the human being.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is well known a collating method for collating a face in which an image of a face is taken by a camera beforehand to register its face data such as contour line and area of the face, interval of its eyes and so forth and a face image taken by the camera is collated with the registered face image to specify the identical person.
Such a conventional collating method, however, takes a long time period, different from well known verification of passwords, because extremely much quantity of face data have to be registered beforehand each of which is separately searched and collated.
As the number of persons to be registered increases, the search collation takes longer time, thereby giving the user discomfort by unfavorably waiting the completion of the search collation.
In order to solve the problem, there may be proposed reduction of face data, for example, reduction of the data items of a contour, an area, a centroid, an interval of eyes, a nose position and so forth, or reduction of data capacity in each item, thereby deteriorating the accuracy of collation and the reliability.
It is, therefore, a primary object of this invention to provide an organism collating method and apparatus which can shorten retrieval time with maintaining the accuracy of collation even if there is much number of the living bodies to be registered as to the organism characteristics.
According to a first aspect of this invention, there is provided an organism collating device for collating concordance of an organism in dimension with characteristics of the registered organisms, which includes a storage means for storing attribute data classifying kinds of organisms relating to the characteristics of the organisms, an extraction means for extracting organism characteristics and attribute data from the organism, and a collation means for searching the organism characteristics stored in the storage means based on the attribute data extracted by the extraction means to collate the searched organism characteristics with the extracted organism characteristics for specifying an organism. The collating device extracts the organism characteristics and its attribute data from an organism (a human being or an animal), searches the registered data of organism characteristics in dimension with the attribute data, and specifies the organism by collating the search organism characteristics with the extracted organism characteristics, whereby a large quantity of the organism characteristic data is focused by the above-mentioned attribute data (hereinafter called as xe2x80x9cfocusedxe2x80x9d) and the time for search may be shortened. Moreover, the data of the organism characteristics is not reduced, thereby maintaining the accuracy of the collation.
According to a second aspect of the invention, there is provided an organism collating device of the first aspect of the invention in which the attribute data is set by a body height, a body weight, a shape and color of clothes. When the attribute data is set to the body height of organism, the body weight, the shape and color of clothes, for example, the collation may be focused to specific body configuration or working clothes of a specific plant.
According to a third aspect of this invention, there is provided an organism collating device of the first aspect of the invention in which the attribute data is set to a magnitude of the collation frequency. When the attribute data is set to the magnitude of the collation frequency, the collation may be focused to the organisms doing frequent entrance and exit of specific area.
According to a fourth aspect of this invention, there is provided an organism collating device of the first aspect of the invention in which the attribute data is set to an age or an age group of an old, a late middle, a young, or a child. When the attribute data is set to the age group or the age, effective focus may be made when the age group has large difference in the ages.
According to a fifth aspect of this invention, there is provided an organism collating device of the first aspect of the invention in which the attribute data is set to a person exiting from a specific area. When the attribute data is set to the persons exiting from the specific area, effective focus may be made by setting to the exiting persons because the entering persons are predicted to exit where many specific persons enter into and exit from the specific area such as a laboratory.
According to a sixth aspect of this invention, there is provided an organism collating device of the first aspect of the invention in which the organism characteristics is set to face data of organisms.
According to a seventh aspect of this invention, there is provided an organism collating method in the device of the first aspect of the invention in which attribute data is searched beforehand and organism characteristics corresponding to the searched attribute data is collated.